The European Union is too diverse in language, culture and religion to operate effectively as a unified governmental body.

A former president of the European Investment Bank, said that: “The purpose of the single currency is to prevent the encroachment of Anglo-Saxon values in Europe.”

Its current structures are not sufficiently democratic.The EU governs too much by diktat and its decision-making process is not sufficiently transparent nor accountable to the electorate.

Paul Mason, commenting on the Italian sovereign debt crisis on Newsnight 9/11/2011, said that joining the euro surrendered sovereignty and now people are seeing how much democracy has been surrendered as well.

The European Arrest Warrant contravenes our doctrine of habeus corpus against arbitrary court action. European ideas of law differ markedly from the UK historic ideas about innocent until proved guilty. The presumption of guilt is beginning to take over in the UK not only through trial by media but even in our political and legal processes. Retrospective application of law is another innovation to UK legislation, which is manifestly unjust but it is being given legal sanction.

Its current structures are not sustainable. Bernard Connolly explained long ago in his book The Rotten Heart of Europe, 1995, why the diverse European national policies will turn the European vision into a nightmare. One size does not fit all. The strains on the euro are being played out before our eyes. There is a desperate attempt to save the euro? Why? The bailouts are simply throwing good money after bad. Robert Peston says of the European Central Bank (ECB) buying of Italian and Spanish bonds: “many will see the ECB as taking a serious credit risk in bailing out two financially over-stretched governments and as behaving contrary to the rules of prudent central banking.” As part of the second bailout deal for Greece, private bondholders were invited to participate because the debt is becoming unmanageable. The current European leaders do not know how to manage this crisis, and we are forced to watch them lurch from crisis to crisis until people will say, Enough is enough. Who can say what will happen at that point? It is significant that in Britain there are a large number of petitions for the restoration of the death penalty. There is a danger of a right-wing backlash as this profligacy unwinds itself. We need Christian politicians more than ever.

Update 19/8/2011: “Increasing numbers of analysts are questioning the survival of the euro due to the political tensions.”27/10/2011 The crisis meeting of European leaders, at the last hour, have voted to increase the European Financial Stability Facility (the European emergency rescue fund) because of the expected default of Greece on its debt and the likely contagion on Italian and French banks. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, called this the greatest crisis to face Europe since the second world war. This is where the European dream has reached, and the difficulty that 27 member states in the EU and 17 member states in the euro to have a common policy is made manifest for all to see. Either there will be greater political integration or member states will leave the euro. The BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) may yet help to bail out the EU’s precarious, indebted position, and the price of this will be the diminishing of western hegemony. Just as climate change is God’s method of knocking reluctant international heads together, so the sovereign debt crisis may yet be used to introduce a more equitable international scene between nations and the world at large. The profligacy of southern European countries is being reigned in, but at the price on future generations. God is “visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation” (Exodus 20:5).

Its structures are hard to understandBarack Obama said at the G20 on 4/11/2011: “There are a lot of institutions here in Europe” and that he got “a crash course” in these. The BBC reporter Paul Mason said on Newsnight the same night: “We are all trying to understand the complexities of Europe.” If the top politician in the world, and a veteran and seasoned BBC reporter cannot understand the EU, how can the ordinary UK voter understand it? If we cannot understand, why do we invest in it? It is as risky as investment bankers who do not understand the products in which they invested.

Its legal framework is interfering with our democracyEU legislation and international law is forcing change upon the UK without the wishes of the people. The electorate has no power to change this as these effects are supra-national and cannot be prevented by our MPs and MEPs.

All in it together attitude. Instead of acknowledging mistakes and changing direction, siren voices call out for more unity and more integration in the face of the eurozone sovereign debt crisis. “Many see the euro - in its current guise at least - to be sustainable only if the euro countries are prepared to issue common eurobonds. Such an “all for one, one for all” debt issuance would require great change in terms of control over national economic policy and fiscal budgets among euro member states.” In other words, more political integration.

Xinhua, the Chinese State news agency, said unless the US cut its “gigantic military expenditure and bloated welfare costs,” another downgrade would be inevitable. It called for the printing of US dollars to be supervised internationally and repeated China’s contention that a new global reserve currency might be needed. The Chinese have been pulling out of the US dollars at a record rate during the past twelve months.

At the very moment when the euro could have taken over from the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency, EU politicians have been found wanting. The ineffectiveness of US politicians has been criticised by Standard and Poor’s in their report of its downgrade of the US from AAA to AA+, in which it complained about the political brinkmanship of US politics. In other words, playing politics with the economy. European leaders have not been much better. We need Christian politicians who can articulate Christian principles of financial prudence.

While the EU interferes with our finances, its own financial accountability is questionable. Its Court of auditors has not certified its annual accounts since 1994. While this is attributed to high standards rather than corruption, many people are mystified why such a situation has been allowed to continue for almost two decades.

EU debt. “A real look at European debt, which is far greater than the narrowly reported official deficits, bodes badly. Bailouts are being affected by the imposition of rising and unsustainable interest rates […] Will the EU survive? Of course it will. It has succeeded in quelling thousands of years of internal warfare. But the euro and current EU structure – well, that’s another matter”. Former US Ambassador to the EU, Alfred Kingon.

The daily cost of the EU. Tax-payers’ money is going to paying massive EU fines. This is in addition to the £40million we give to Brussels every day.

Too much money, Parliamentary time and judicial time is wasted on EU regulations.

The EU Budget was increased in Oct 2010 when national budgets were being cut.

The Commonwealth betrayal. Many people have forgotten that in our desire to join the European common market the UK betrayed its trading relationships with the Commonwealth countries. It is commonly said that Europe is our biggest market – but that was our choice. Ever since, the EU debate has been business-led, to the neglect of the social consequences. In writing on Europe’s missed opportunity and “a wasted decade”, Gordon Brown postulates “a ‘global Europe’ plan – a determination that Europe stops looking inwards and start to look outwards to export markets in the eight fastest growing economies (India, China, Brazil, Russia, Indonesia, Turkey, Korea and Mexico) that will generate most of the worlds new growth. Today, only 7.5 percent of Europe’s exports go to these fast rising economies, which will create 70 percent of the world’s growth.” In other words, our focus on Europe has been short-sighted and we need a global vision.

Article Six of the Lisbon Treaty states that the European Convention on Human Rights “shall constitute general principles of the Union’s law”, so that the Tory Government’s attempts to escape from the Convention by means of a British Bill of Rights will be an ineffective fig leaf.Many people are concerned about European justice. The case of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, has highlighted the weakness in the “tick box” approach to theEuropean Arrest Warrant (EAW). The EAW does not allow a person to prove their innocence prior to its implementation, but the EAW acts as a rapid method of transferring a suspect to another jurisdiction, which raises many questions: 1. the injustice in being removed from one’s native soil to defend oneself in a foreign jurisdiction; 2. the assumption that all EU justice systems are satisfactory, which is already being called into question, along with many other European institutions; 3. the overthrow of habeus corpus, a bed-rock of British justice since Magna Carta, 4. the abandonment of presumption of innocence until proven guilty; and 5. it is equivalent to an automatic refusal of bail. There have been very many EAWs used and examples of gross incompetence and abuse.

European Courts are being given authority like the mediaeval papacy. We don’t want either popes of Rome nor European Courts telling us how we should think. The former used to excommunicate and deliver over to the secular power to punish with fines or death; the latter is now taking on the mantle of inquisitor general of thought and behaviour. The proper role of courts is to adjudicate disputes between parties not to teach them how to think. This attitude is infecting the judicial system and a judge in a British court recently said in a case involving homosexual rights that religion is out of date. Which Act of Parliament was he interpreting when he said so?